Putting them all together because I don’t have a lot to say about each individual episode.

These episodes cover the Meruru idol thing and… yeah.

Looking at the commentary as basically the opinions of the producers, it’s nice to see that they aren’t making the characters contradictory without a reason – they’re supposed to be. Kirino’s a horrible main character. Why? Because the producers /made/ her a horrible main character. If I rated this based on the quality of the characters (as in, whether they’re ‘good’ or not), Oreimo would definitely be on my ‘Do not Watch’ list – but if I rated this based on the quality of the characters (as in, their detail), it seems that they /do/ reflect much of the weird things surrounding society nowadays.

We do have to keep in mind – nobody’s perfect. Anime’s become a medium in which people /do/ become perfect – not perfect as in ‘he fights so well’, but perfect as in they have unwavering ideals (that always turn out to be right), managing to always do the right thing (even if it should have failed 80% of the time), and always learning from their ‘mistakes’ (and becoming stronger in the process). Then again, we also have to keep in mind – anime isn’t real. It’s fictional. It’s alright for people to be perfect. It’s also nice to see some imperfect people.

For some reason, I begin to see many parallels of Oreimo with Azazel-san – for example, Kanako’s idoling of Meruru mirroring Azazel’s Ichigo-tan arc. They both view otaku culture as disgusting (and rightly so – I would even view otaku culture as disgusting if I didn’t already view otaku culture as disgusting), and if you put any of them in a room with Kirino they’d probably think her disgusting. That’s exactly what episode 10 of this commentary did – Kanako admitted that Kirino is quite disgusting. Indeed, this whole story would be a lot different from a normal person’s point of view – Kyousuke isn’t normal, by the way.

About otaku culture – it’s funny how Oreimo is almost completely fuelled by otaku money. Look at the money they used to make so many versions of that darned OP and EDs (seriously, what a waste of time), as well as the beautiful animation in the anime. The plot ended up sucking a bit at the end, and they did a decent job with putting quality in the anime, but this… reception is just unbelievable. So much money spent on Kirino, and so much more money gained from doing that. Sigh… anime is an industry, and industries need money. Otaku feed the industry, but they have no money…